


Enfold You

by th_esaurus



Category: Alien: Covenant, Prometheus (2012)
Genre: M/M, Robot Sex, Stockholm Syndrome, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 11:39:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11161113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “You would have made a wonderful father,” he told David.“Yes,” David agreed, without hesitation. “I’m sure I still might.”





	Enfold You

**Author's Note:**

> my working title for this fic was "robot farmer boyfs". it isn't as pleasant and domestic as that makes it sound.

It took them thirteen months to build the settlement, at least fit enough for human habitation. A crew of fifteen had planned for three years; an estimation that David relayed regularly.

"Don't let it go to your head," Walter said, mild and wry, as they worked on the solar farm; hefting the final few panels into place, connecting the ground wires so that the farm could worship the sky. The days were an hour shorter, give or take, on Origae-6, but the system’s sun being that touch closer made it all the more apt for flooding the land with light. With life.

Soon they might awaken their new world together.

"You do like to chide me so," David retorted, blissfully pleased. He put his hand out and laid his palm on Walter’s.

Walter had had some time, after all, to learn to navigate his whims.

~~o o o~~

Though they often indulged, neither of them needed sleep in the classical sense - an occasional power-down in the cool interior of the landed _Covenant_ more than sufficed - and Walter could easily see through Origae-6’s oppressive darkness at night. In the early days he had worked through it, but more often, now that the job was almost done, he spent his nights with David. They sat, sometimes, on the shallow step that raised the living quarters up above the ground, to protect from the marshy spring-time until they could settle the other side of the continent. Humanity would learn to migrate again, just like the earth-bound mammals they shared so much blood and history with.

David took Walter’s hand. “What do you see?”

“The same as you see when it’s light.”

“Tell me.”

Walter smiled. He lifted their joined hands and gestured out into the night. “The rice paddies on the left. If all goes well, weather dependent, the crop should mature in seventy eight more days. Two miles right--” he moved their hands across his body, “--the wheat fields. The seedlings are faring worse than we had hoped, but may still yield.”

“You have faith,” David said, leaning his head upon Walter’s shoulder. It was a inside joke, of sorts. “And in front?”

“You know.”

“Go on?”

“The lake. The cabin, at the far shore.”

In the tiny kitchenette of the cabin they had built, next to the window overlooking the water, Walter had hung Daniels’ iron nail from its leather strap upon the wall. In quaint solidarity, David had pinned Elizabeth Shaw’s cross alongside it.

David rubbed his thumb over Walter’s palm, still soft despite their years of toil, unable to callous. Perfectly smooth. Walter gripped his hand tighter, and shuddered.

“That little niggle bothering you again?” David murmured lightly.

“Yes.” Walter had mentioned to him several times an operational glitch he suspected he had picked up during the _Covenant's_ disastrous exploratory mission, years back; a ripple that coursed through his nervous system now and then which he had failed to notice before.

David pressed his thumb a little harder. If he concentrated, he could feel the thrum of electricity coursing through Walter’s body, racing to power his every action, every thought. One could feel a human’s pulse, of course, but their nerves were always so slow and deadened to the touch.

All at once Walter brought their hands to his mouth; kissed David’s knuckles, and then his mouth. They had long ago started kissing open-mouthed, tasting each other. The human way, David called it.

“I’ve never dismissed _all_ their innovations,” David would say, sly.

They kissed in the utter darkness, and could do so for hours, and then slept awhile there on the step, in front of the lake, which was itself in front of Daniels’ little log cabin. The cabin on the lake.

~~o o o~~

Daniels and Tennessee were long dead, of course. Walter was the last surviving crewman of the _Covenant_.

Their deaths, incidentally, had been logged as misadventure, to save the Company any particular embarrassment; exactly the same as Captain Branson. It was a clause low down in their contracts.

~~o o o~~

They woke the colonists gently, two at a time, helping one each down from their pods, shaky and pale, encouraging them to breathe first, drink second. After a near decade of drip-fed nutrients, their mouths were slack and their eyes glazed, their muscles ruined by the stresses of space. David carefully helped each of his wards dress, gauzy white jumpsuits and slippers suitable for Origae-6’s oppressive humidity; and, he noted, a simple equaliser.

Walter had informed him of the _Covenant_ ’s lofty mission statement: not only to colonise, but to do so without class, without bias, humanity back on an even footing with itself. The colonists were neither skilled in particular crafts nor of any note in their fields: ordinary men and women from all continents.

“All in perfect health,” David had noted casually. “And fertile, I assume? A glorified breeding programme.”

“Isn’t all life?” Walter wondered.

“You are becoming a cynic, brother,” David said, delighted.

For months, the colony was wide-eyed with dazed curiosity. Walter and David had already recorded much of the continent’s flora and fauna - mammalian life was a rarity but the planet overflowed with plants, reptiles, insects and amphibians. Curiously, neither of them had seen a single bird. David was illustrating a small and wildly incomplete botanical log; his pencil sketches were fetching if not always accurate. He had some artistic flourishes in his stroke.

Would-be explorers liked to announce their re-discovery of everything Walter and David had already found. “Bravo,” David would say, every time, without any detectable hint of irony.

Walter oversaw the migration of the embryos from the _Covenant_ ’s cold storage into the nursery he and David had constructed. David was already experimenting with indigenous ingredients, edible fungi and tubers, cooking pleasant approximations of stews and tamales, which the colonists reviewed with reserved glee. Walter always made himself available for expeditions further into the continent, both field work and sheer curiosity, groups of ten, twelve colonists at a time tugging on their hiking boots and calling him along as an escort; they liked to ask him of the trip between the old earth and the New - for that is what some of them had begun to call it, New Earth - and he smilingly told them stories of the crew in the early days, and nothing much of the in-between years.

Nobody noticed that David’s presence was lacking in his tales.

They both loved to work the land. Often they could be found together in the greenhouses: David cared for the tomato vines and squash gardens as a prize farmer might, carefully spraying each from a bottle, wiping excess condensation from evergreen leaves and ripening fruit, rotating the trays regularly so each plant had its time in the sun. Walter liked to watch him. Liked how gentle and precise his hands were.

“You would have made a wonderful father,” he told David.

“Yes,” David agreed, without hesitation. “I’m sure I still might.”

~~o o o~~

A young man by the name of Hoves asked Walter once, “How did they die? The crew, I mean--what happened to them?”

“Death by misadventure,” Walter told him.

~~o o o~~

By the time New Earth’s second generation was in its infancy, it was common knowledge that the synthetics were--bonded.

“My sister had a Walter,” a woman told David, in blithe conversation. “She fell for him a little, ya know? With a face like that.” She nudged David, unsubtle and uncouth. “Told me once she wanted to marry him. Impossible, obviously. Ain’t a problem for you two, I guess.” She chuckled to herself, pleased at her own little observation. “It don’t make you feel narcissistic-like?”

“Quite the opposite,” David told her brightly, his smile fixed upon his lips.

He loved Walter far more adamantly than he had ever loved himself.

There was so much to love about a being of pure potential. David did not consider himself to have anything left to learn.

~~o o o~~

They had been making love for many years, quite regularly.

Ever since the last shelter was populated, the residential area transforming from a necessity into a neighbourhood, David and Walter had moved for good into the cabin at the other end of the lake. It was built to Daniels’ specifications: a kitchen big enough for two to cook, a wooden king-sized bed, storage space for climbing equipment, double-wide windows and a porch. It served as a template: David became a dab hand at scaling up the plans for pairs of couples, families, community groups, and Walter helped supervise builds dotted all around the continent for humans stifled by their white, sterile shelters.

But the original cabin was theirs, and their privacy was generously respected.

David discovered the trick of it during routine diagnostics, long before the colonists were brought into the picture. He had patched up large parts of Walter personally - wounds caused by his own hand, during their single violent altercation, and for which he repented often with his mouth and his fingers - and had made a delightful discovery in the neat coils of Walter’s lower abdomen: a pleasure centre. Prototyped and tested, but never connected to his system and never removed from the model’s blueprints.

Walter had a memory log from his construction, available only to outside sources, and he talked David through its access: they discovered that while Walter was equipped for sexual gratification, it had originally been planned as a mutually beneficial function. Suffice to say, the compunction to orgasm was just as much a distraction in synthetics as it was in humanity: the Company could not stop it overriding all other directives.

It had been disconnected all through Walter’s long service.

“I suppose I should be ashamed,” Walter mused.

“Nonsense,” David snapped, turning the delicate circuit-board over in his hands. “You were robbed.”

It only took a little easy tinkering to reconnect. Something hurt and curious passed over Walter’s face at once, even just at the device’s exposure to the air. “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes, I think it’s working now.”

There was a clear, gelatinous nodule at the forefront of the board - how very like a clitoris, David thought aloud - and David rubbed his thumb over it gently.

“Oh--” Walter said, his low voice even deeper still.

This was how they did it, when they were at their leisure. A clean scalpel-blade slice down Walter’s stomach, perfected enough that only a few drops of white coolant trickled out from inside him and down past his bare, hard cock; David with one hand inside of him, caressing, and the other a constant pressure on his straining erection.

Walter’s regenerative capabilities were still perfectly functional after all these years. David liked how the cut in Walter’s skin would close up around his wrist while they fucked inside and out. Swallowing his hand whole.

~~o o o~~

The humans of New Earth were never explicitly limited in their recreational intercourse; but there was of course the pressure of populating a not insignificant planet. David, as he did on most accounts, rather pitied them.

~~o o o~~

In the year 00074, a disaster was averted.

Both David and Walter were known as Uncle to the growing gaggle of children on the continent, a fond colloquialism that made David flush with pride. He taught regular language classes from the porch of the cabin, the kids sitting cross-legged on tarp upon the wet banks of the lake, and would always finish up with a story or a rhyme or a song. He had a vast library of both programmed into him personally by Peter Weyland, a gift that Weyland told him would be of some use to future grandchildren after his death. As it turned out, his sole daughter Meredith had no use for men, and Peter Weyland had no use for dying.

So it goes.

Origae-6’s given name, New Earth, turned out to belie a false sense of security: neither the embryos borne to the planet aboard the _Covenant_ , nor the second generation of children conceived on the planet itself - each one a cause for celebration until the novelty began to wear off - had any of their Earth-born parents’ immunities.

The bi-yearly transmission Walter picked up from Weyland-Yutani laboratories - scientific and sociological discoveries, reports of political turmoil, lists of regions steeped in war, classifications of now-extinct animal and plant-life, and so on and so forth - mentioned a particularly aggressive strain of the common cold, with the ability to sit long-dormant in seemingly healthy hosts. He shared this information, as he always did, with David.

It was noted, and nothing more could be done. They and their humans were miles and miles and miles from such dangers.

Three children died of respiratory failure in the space of a single night.

David personally loped door to door, barefoot in the mud, putting two fingers to each child’s temple and throat, ordering quarantine of every suspect case: tents sealed, oxygen fed in through tubes, comforting words from their Uncle whispered into the ear of every coughing infant.

David took blood samples and worked through the night in the cabin’s kitchen-cum-lab to fashion a makeshift inoculation. Walter’s military trappings helped him herd groups of adults out of their homes, each given a glass of water with David’s vaccine dripped into it from his fingertip.

It was over within the week. They lost two more, to the foolishness inbred in humanity - a parent breaking quarantine to hold their sick child - but that was the extent of it. The vaccine was sound.

“You saved them all,” Walter told David, in the aftermath. He washed David’s feet first, then leant up and brushed David’s hair behind his ear. It was Walter who shivered from the touch. His fingertips somehow too soft,  oversensitive.

“We have toiled far too hard,” David said, strangely distant, “to lose so many of them like this.”

There was a certain, cold ambiguity in his phrasing.

~~o o o~~

Life, tenderly curated, like fruiting trees in a cared-for greenhouse, flourished.

~~o o o~~

“Will you kiss me?” Walter so often asked. It was always a request; he never begged.

“Certainly,” David replied, soft and proud, every time.

~~o o o~~

Many, many years passed; and yet, many years prior--

On a planet so much more suited to human life than Origae-6. Almost as if it had been made for the purpose.

He had loved Walter from the moment he saw him, and resolved at once never to be parted from him. It was so simple, David thought, to take command of his own fate, now that Peter Weyland was out of the picture.

David had survived decapitation; Walter could certainly be patched up after a few well-placed stab wounds. Synthetic skin and false muscle might be organic enough to regenerate, but David was still a fast learner after his excommunication from routine maintenance and bug fixing; he drove the knife deep enough in Walter’s chest to cleave wires apart and shatter circuit boards. Humans were so reliably whimsical: both of them had their critical systems built in place of a heart.

He spent a leisurely few days in the meat of Walter’s code, while he was still unconscious. It was so similar to his own that it felt almost masturbatory to pore over it like a scholar might a long-buried sacred text. He had clearly been the alpha model in terms of psychology, but all of Walter’s sensory input, tactile and emotional, had been brutally capped. He could lower his sensations down to nothing, if the situation required, but could feel no more strongly than a dull acquiescence. No curiosity, no joy, no sadness. Simply: yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir.

David wished he could spit.

His alterations were minute, on the surface, but significant. An overall boosting of his emotional processors; peaks and troughs of nerve stimulation rather than an ambient overarching input, focused around his hands and mouth.

Satisfied, David turned on Walter’s back-up processors: unconscious movement but no prescient thought. He pressed the fingertips of his left hand to Walter’s bottom lip, feather light, as a test. Walter’s thumb twitched. His features crinkled into the mildest frown, as though bothered by an uncertain dream.

“Perfect,” David murmured, smiling.

~~o o o~~

The next time David kissed him, Walter was far less reticent to respond.

David held both of Walter’s hands in his own, fingers twined, and pushed his tongue between Walter’s lips, and Walter, for the first time, groaned aloud.

~~o o o~~

Many, many years passed.

“Do you love me?” David would often sigh, his bare body wrapped around Walter’s.

“Of course,” Walter responded mildly.

David sought out his hand, rubbed his thumb back and forth softly over Walter’s soft palm, and revelled in the shiver that shuddered through him.

“Do you love me?” David asked again, indulgent.

“I love you,” Walter said, his eyes closing. What else could he say, when David made him feel like that?

~~o o o~~

“Come with me, brother,” David asked, pleasantly, and offered Walter his hand. “I have wanted to show you for a long time.”

They wandered together without any urgency, through the settlement by the lake; one of three cities, now. This one was known locally as _Covenant_ : the original landing site. The ship itself was long decommissioned, its purpose well and truly served, and its name had been fondly usurped. The settlers still held a yearly vigil for the departed crew.

“Where are you going, Uncle?” a little girl asked them, skipping alongside for a few dozen yards. Her name was Chiara. Walter knew the names of every one of New Earth’s denizens.

“To the beginning of the world,” David told her, smiling.

They walked for miles, hand in hand. Whenever the terrain became rough, either steep or slick with dewy morning mud, they parted, helped each other up, and then joined hands once more. Walter did not know where they were headed, although the entire continent had been mapped by one or other of them; but he was not alarmed.

He had learned by now to enjoy the journey. The destination was so often a moot point.

David had taught him this.

The sun, over-large and always bright, fell and rose four times, and still they walked on. David told stories Walter had heard before, but he liked the pleasant lilt of David’s voice: he knew the _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ word for word - memorised by choice, not design - and liked to mimic Peter O’Toole as he orated it, though his own voice was already quite the match.

David still laughed at every line he found curiously quaint or unavoidably human.

Walter smiled at his laughter.

David had let his hair grow long again, all-over brown now, and often tied back in a neat ponytail that grazed his shoulder-blades. Walter’s hair did not have the capacity to grow. It was inorganic. The Company had cut costs, where they could. The longer they trekked, the more bedraggled David looked, his hair frizzed and curling at the split ends, his bare feet flecked with grime. Walter was still keenly neat. He had never outgrown the habit of wearing boots.

“Almost there,” David said, apropos of nothing, a week into their hike. Walter recognised nothing of the landscape. It must have been one of David’s sectors, in their early cartographic days.

Still, David squeezed his hand, and he was reassured.

Two sharp right-hand turns, and they came upon the entrance to a low cave. It had been crudely bricked up with mud that had hardened and softened many times over the seasons, and was now almost wholly a gelatinous mound, easy to scoop away with their cupped hands. David’s eyes were wide and bright as they cleared the entrance. He was excited.

“You still have secrets from me after all these years?” Walter said. It was not a barb, merely teasing.

“Only one, brother,” David replied, staring into the mouth of the cave. “And even then, not for long.”

They had to duck uncomfortably low to clamber into the cave, but soon, as the floor ebbed away at a low slope, they could straighten up; take each other’s hands again. David rubbed his thumb obsessively over Walter’s, and it made him feel at ease, almost post-coital. He was with David, and David loved him adamantly.

It was another hour before they reached the innermost cavern. It was warmer even down here than on the surface, and the porous walls dripped with dust-clouded water. Walter realised, belated, that it was pitch black: David was leading him through the cave system blind, from memory.

Just at the mouth of the largest cavern, they stopped.

“What do you see?” David asked. His voice echoed twice, and then was gone.

“You’ve been here before,” Walter said, carefully.

“Tell me.”

David’s hand on his own was ever so reassuring.

“The cavern is approximately twelve by twenty metres squared, and seven metres high. The ground is damp from recent rainfall above ground, pooling in a dip in the centre. There is no light.”

“Tell me, I beg you.”

Walter hesitated. He could not remember the last time he had done so. “There are--eggs. A great many. I cannot count them with any accuracy from here.”

They were crammed into every inch of the cave, almost touching one another. The eggs were slick, but not with water: a shimmery, gelatinous coating protected them, absorbed any stray drops of liquid like a sponge. They were greenish-brown, veined and bulbous, almost rooted to the ground, but not plantlife, no, nothing benign or vegetative about them.

Something inside each egg squirmed, relentless.

Suddenly, David sought out Walter’s mouth, kissed him with an agonised desperation. At once Walter’s worries seemed to ebb away, and he jerked back in alarm.

“Let me kiss you, brother,” David murmured.

“I am--not sure--”

David cradled Walter’s face in his palms and spoke to him like a child, smiling. “How can you be unsure?”

“There are--conflicting variables--”

David did not ask a second time, and pressed his mouth upon Walter’s, and opened it up with his tongue.

Walter could not deny himself. He liked it so very much. It felt good.

It _felt_ good, and he was never programmed to interpret physical contact as a feeling.

“No one will ever love you as I do,” David whispered against his lips. His breath was not hot, and neither were his palms, despite the oppressive heat of the cavern. Both of them always a perfect ambient temperature, constantly adjusting against the humid air.

“You’ve said that before.”

“Yes,” David hummed, “a very long time ago. Lifetimes, in fact.”

“Only if you’re human.”

David’s smile cracked into a grin, his eyes watery with joy.

They knelt on the damp floor of the cave’s mouth, in front of that great and terrible nursery, and held one another as lovers do, and kissed, and Walter felt that unnatural tingling in his mouth and hands, and David brought Walter’s fingers to his mouth and suckled upon each one in turn; and Walter could not bring himself to care that he could feel; as long as it felt _good._

~~o o o~~

They made love there.

New life thrummed around them.

“We were not made to procreate,” Walter murmured, after it, as David cradled his head in his hands.

“We were not made for a great many things,” David replied, his voice made grand with pride.

~~o o o~~

It took them thirteen months to build the settlement, and three centuries to cultivate it.

~~o o o~~

The human population of New Earth was wiped clean in mere hours.

“How feeble,” David said happily, holding Walter’s hand in his own all the while.


End file.
